Bolt and NVIDIA: Building AI for Autonomous Cars in Europe

Bolt, a leading European ridesharing company, has partnered with NVIDIA to bring autonomous vehicle (AV) technology to Europe.

Estonian-based Bolt will use NVIDIA’s technologies to build AI foundations for scaling AV technology across the continent.

This comes as Europe sees the roll out of AV technology, ramping up deployments to mirror earlier adoption in China and the US. 

Integration with Bolt

Bolt operates in more than 50 countries and serves more than 200 million customers.

It operates across more than 850 cities through ride-sharing, car hailing and delivery operations. 

The real-world-driving data from these operations can provide a foundation for building AV systems. 

Jevgeni Kabanov, President & Head of Autonomous Driving at Bolt, says: "Real-world data is the most valuable asset in the race for safe autonomy.

"By marrying Bolt’s operational scale with the NVIDIA Hyperion Platform, Alpamayo foundation models, AI infrastructure and open models and libraries, we are creating a European-led AV offering that ensures our continent remains at the forefront of mobility innovation while maintaining full control over our data and technology."

NVIDIA’s AV technology

Bolt will integrate the NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion platform, designed for robotaxi deployments.

The system will utilise dual NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Thor processors and a multi-sensor architecture combining lidar, camera and radar for robust perception and redundancy.  

Running NVIDIA DriveOS, this system provides the high-performance compute required for real-time processing and level 4-ready autonomous capabilities.

Bolt ride-sharing fleet will use NVIDIA Omniverse libraries, NVIDIA Cosmos world foundation models, NVIDIA Alpamayo AV foundation models and NVIDIA AI infrastructure to accelerate safe AV development for European roads. 

David Gardner, VP Corporate Finance at Bolt, says: “Our work together will combine Bolt’s real-world mobility data with NVIDIA’s AI infrastructure, simulation tools and autonomous vehicle platform to accelerate the development of safe and scalable AV systems designed for European roads.

“This builds on the partnerships we announced last year with Pony.ai and Stellantis.

“Adding NVIDIA strengthens the AI and compute layer needed to train and scale these systems and ensures Bolt is well-positioned to be a leader in bringing autonomous mobility technology to Europe.”

Nvidia’s Alpamayo

These NVIDIA technologies span AI models, simulations tools data sets all of which are designed to speed up the development of AVs. 

NVIDIA’s Alpamayo, which is a library of technology and infrastructure, is focussed on ensuring that AVs can overcome rare or unexpected events that AVs may encounter.

They do this by using vision-language-action AI models, which can verbalise their decision logic.

Alpamayo will be used to accelerate policy learning and behavioural adaptation across diverse European traffic norms, helping ensure the resulting AI models reflect the complexity and diversity of European city streets.

AVs in Europe

The adoption of AVs has been slower in Europe compared to the United States and China, where the technology has already been deployed in various cities. 

Europe has seen the roll out of various pilot projects, while according to data from McKinsey, the US and China each see more than 450,000 and 250,000 commercial rides per week, respectively.

According to Deloitte, more than a quarter of UK drivers do not trust AI in cars, mirroring scepticism in the US (26%) and Germany (25%).

This is contrasted with the overwhelming acceptance seen in India (82%) and China (77%).

Increasing visibility of AV projects, as well as providing greater publicly available safety information about AVs may go some of the way to convincing Europe’s drivers about the technology.